Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky said that video playback has changed considerably in the past few years, and Windows 8 is designed to support the shifting models. Windows 8?s video decoding for “common media tasks” will be offloaded to a dedicated hardware subsystem to dramatically lower power consumption and improve battery life.

AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have all shipped integrated GPUs with hardware-assisted video decode for a number of years and it is not clear what Microsoft was using as its test chip. It would appear to be something from the Atom range.

The audio engine in Windows 8 buffers a much higher amount of content when in steady playback mode. This allows the CPU to spend up to 100x more time asleep while handling audio, which should translate into significantly improved battery life.

Microsoft is not supporting native .MKV. The Blog said that developers are free to package codecs for standards like FLAC, MKV, and Ogg alongside the apps that use them. This would make codec installation simultaneous with app installation, rather than requiring a separate download.

Microsoft's DRM for it all is called “PlayReady,” and it’s compatible with both streaming services and content downloading. The blog states that “the Media Foundation extensibility model allows for third parties to integrate their custom content protection systems with built-in hardware-accelerated video decoding.

If a service needs to use a custom streaming format or content protection system, it can integrate its own technology without having to compromise on decoding quality or battery runtime.

Sources are now spilling the beans on exactly what we can expect from Orbis, or the PlayStation 4, when it is arrives. For the most part it is about what we already knew, with no real surprises; and it looks to be a very smart decision for AMD.

If the tech specs are correct, the latest info has the PS4 showing the unit being built from what amounts to off-the-self parts. The unit will use the AMD A8-3850 APU and Radeon 7670 GPU. The AP-3850 APU is said to clock in at 2.9GHz and it will be a quad core chip, while the HD 7670 which will offer 1GB of RAM and while we have heard rumors of a projected clock speed, we would wait till we are closer to release before we predict what this will actually be.

As we told you previously, this selection does take back from the PC side, but there still a lot more questions than answers. Our contacts in the development community seem divided on what the box can actually deliver in terms of performance. According to one developer, “…we really don’t know how well the unit can perform, but so far it has been on par with the current generation.”